Comments | kelly

kelly_lesbo

Me

Jul 10, 2007 23:32

I'm beginning to realize that my service to Eris is leading me down particularly odd personality paths of late. The fact that I identify with buddhist philosophy does not negate my deep appreciation of the discordian nature of being. My sense of humor is so deeply entrenched in pushing the boundaries of my own mind space that I'm losing "normal" ( Read more... )

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drainboy July 11 2007, 10:46:27 UTC

1) I have no fear of death, but I have a very real fear of dying and it hurting a lot. So I still have a lizard brain fear of flying which my rational brain keeps in check ( ... )

andrewducker July 11 2007, 11:17:25 UTC

I agree we can never die

I'm trying to imagine what your definition of "die" is here. Care to fill me in?

drainboy July 11 2007, 11:28:43 UTC

That the concept of death is an illusionary one, either we are somehow eternal observers or life is merely the illusion of life.

Either we always are or we never really were at all.

This is even more true if all of our cells really are replaced every seven years (which I'm failing to find a citation for :)

Would you consider Star-Trek transportation to be "death"?

andrewducker July 11 2007, 12:42:27 UTC

Would you consider Star-Trek transportation to be "death"?

Depends on which explanation they're using :->

If it's the warping of space then no. If it's the "takes you apart and builds a whole new you at the other end" then yes.

Either we always are or we never really were at all.
We are self-sustaining patterns. True, those patterns change over time, but there's continuity to them. If you entirely break the link or destroy the pattern then that's death.

drainboy July 11 2007, 12:53:27 UTC

I was, of course, talking about the latter :)

And would you say a chair is a self-sustaining pattern? Or by self-sustaining did you mean as a biological process?

Also, would you say that life is an illusion? Specifically that our sense of being alive is an illusion?

andrewducker July 11 2007, 13:18:38 UTC

Chairs aren't self-sustaining in anything more than a terribly simply way (i.e. it resists some attempts to change its shape). It's not really self-repairing in the same way that life is.

our sense of being alive is an illusion
Not sure what you mean by this. I don't have a specific sense of being alive. I have lots of senses that tell me large numbers of different things, but none that would tell me whether I was alive or dead. I'm not sure what function that would have :->

drainboy July 11 2007, 13:55:52 UTC

I agree chairs aren't self-repairing in the same way as a biological process (which is why I asked what you meant by self-sustaining so there was no confusion :), however to say that pattern breaking is "death" because the system is self-sustaining doesn't make much sense in any objective way. Would a robot arm that stacked up a set of blocks "die" when you perturbed the system in such a way that the blocks stopped being restacked just because it had at one point been self-sustaining? Does a caterpillar "die" when it reforms as a butterfly?

Not sure what you mean by this. I don't have a specific sense of being alive.No and you don't have a specific sense of breathing or running either. In fact I'd argue that you don't have a specific sense of sight or smell, just a lot of interesting chemical reactions that come together to give you something your brain thinks is cohesive. If it being cohesive to your brain is what makes it a single sense then I would say that you have a sense of running (as long as you go running long enough) where ( ... )

andrewducker July 11 2007, 15:57:17 UTC

If you mean "All in our heads" then you're basically saying "My feelings are in my head".

Which sounds pretty tautological to me :->

kelly_lesbo July 11 2007, 16:45:57 UTC

Sometimes Andrew I can't tell if you are playing devil's advocate or you attempt to be deliberately disengaging to the meat of the topic. The fact yo uput emoticons at the end suggests you do get a little feeling of warmth rushing through you at a point well made. Nothing wrong with that, but it confuses me as to your actual position ( ... )

andrewducker July 12 2007, 07:53:00 UTC

I know some very intelligent people who are great and deconstructing arguments and feel accomplished at doing so even if they don't admit it, but in that process they miss all the potential benefit of growing new ideas and perspectives from shared insights.

Or rather, they don't learn from false arguments. I learn new things all the time - but I question _everything_ - I don't trust you to know The Truthg any more than George Bush or George Monbiot. I don't expect you to take anything I say on faith either.

It's just that your points remind a very certain younger version of me, and Mike about 4 years ago and I'm wondering how each of us has ended up with our current understandings and why mine changed so dramatically.And there we hit the nail on the head - you remind me of how I was about 10 years ago, and I'm intrigued by it ( ... )

kelly_lesbo July 12 2007, 16:22:24 UTC

I do see where you are coming from ( ... )

andrewducker July 12 2007, 17:43:08 UTC

See, that's fascinating - and a perfect example of how conversation gets interesting once you move past the generalities and pat phrases and get into specifics :->

Aaaaand you'll get a proper answer once I've had a chance to think about it - and as I'm gaming tonight and then off to London for the weekend first thing tomorrow I'll have a couple of days to mull it over.

Cheers for the thought-provoking!

kelly_lesbo July 12 2007, 18:29:47 UTC

There be gold in this here brain o'mine, but gosh darn ya have to dig fer it.

Darn tootin!

drainboy July 13 2007, 16:51:17 UTC

Well I'd say that reality is in my head, feelings no more and no less. What I'm saying when I say "I agree we can never die" is that either we were never really here in the first place or there is some other aspect that survives. We are our own self-delusion.

I have no evidence for "some other aspect" therefore the former by rational deduction, although I always get the niggling feeling that there's something else that I don't seem to have the vocabulary for. Something logically wrong with the fact that I'm an observer at all.

andrewducker July 14 2007, 09:11:38 UTC

I'd say that reality is in my head
I'd completely disagree with you. Your perception of reality is in your head. Unless you're going to go the whole solipsist hog then you're going to have to admit that there's an external reality that your interpretations are coming from.

And why do you think we were never here in the first place? There's some part of The Whole Sort Of General MishMash that's pattern matching the things around it, making predictions, has self-awareness, etc. that we can identify as you. You even use the word "I" 5 or 6 times up there - if that's not what you mean by it, what is?

drainboy July 15 2007, 22:07:14 UTC

Everything you can look at or talk about or point to or sense or think about as being in some way separate from anything else is in your head. You've never experienced objective existence. Anything that is distinguished from anything else is only in the head of anyone that makes such a distinction. Which is what I meant when I said "reality is in my head", which is a wrong use of the word reality. What I meant was "everything apart from reality is in my head, but that includes everything"

So as I am just some transient structure of "whatever" that briefly has the kind of organisation able to create tautological distinctions (anything I define as distinct, is only distinct in the sense that I define it as being distinct), then any distinction of myself as separate from some universal whole is only as real as I define it to be to me. If, then, the material world as we know it is the only world there is, then any existence as a distinct entity is only the self-bootstrapping distinction as made by the kind of entity able to make such ( ... )

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